here-now
Publishes HTML pages, files, and whole sites to live URLs without leaving the terminal. A first-party skill from here.now itself: "like gists, but for HTML."
Show Us Your Agent Skills / EP 03 / guest dossier
ELEANOR BERGER
JIMINY HEALTH
HERMES · FNORD
157 SKILLS
YOLO, FENCED
ELEANOR BERGER
Eleanor will not let one AI validate another's work: "there's this infinite regress where you could get stuck in a local minimum and you never get out of it." Which makes it a surprise that she now lets a personal agent roam free on a spare Mac mini named Fnord, publishing pages and running jobs it schedules itself. The same engineer who demands concrete verification is the one who fenced that machine off from everything that matters before giving it room to run.
REALIZEdon't review the yaml, run it and sample what it built
500 TOKher scope fix: a hard budget, or it runs on and on
EXPOSEDprivate data plus a line out: assume you're wide open
M1 MINIthe fence is hardware: a segregated mac mini over tailscale
157skills fnord runs and extends on its own inside that box
DOZENShtml pages it ships a day, one per little result
EP 03 · ELEANOR BERGER · Fnord roaming free on a fenced Mac mini, live on stream
"If I know a little bit of what I'm doing, enough to evaluate it, all of a sudden I've got this exoskeleton."
Agents changed which projects are worth starting at all. "If something can't happen fast, I might just not do it." 00:38:03
FNORD INTRODUCED ITSELF
her personal agent harness: one Discord message in, a finished web page out
Minutes before the stream, Eleanor sent Fnord a single Discord message: "I want to present this Hermes instance to the audience. Create a cool interactive web page." That was the whole brief.
What came back, published to here.now on its own: a running catalogue of Fnord's skills, its parallel child agents, the GPT 5.5 route, and the Discord and WhatsApp channels it answers on.
"If you are getting instructions from the internet and you have connections out to the internet, you should assume that you're completely exposed."
Simon Willison's lethal trifecta, private data plus untrusted input plus an outbound network, taken literally. It is why Fnord lives on its own hardware and never gets near her clinical data at Jiminy. 00:56:57
GIVING IT MORE ROPE
her rules for letting an agent roam without getting burned
Earn autonomy graduallyStart at ask-for-everything, then hand over more rope as its self-evaluation proves reliable. "I gave it a bit more rope." Reversible the moment something crosses the line. 00:56:20
Segregate by hardware, not permissionsThe lethal trifecta is essentially unmitigable in software, so the fix is physical: a separate Mac mini over Tailscale, no path to clinical data. 00:42:51
Verify by realizing, not reviewingFor cloud infra, don't ask another model to bless the YAML. "Realize this configuration and sample what it actually created. That's something I can trust." 00:34:52
Under-specify the cron, let Hermes route"I create a lot of cron jobs and a lot of them I under-specify." Hermes decides when a script is enough, when to call an LLM inside it, and when the whole task needs a model. 01:00:51
Make publishing the default finish"Do a web page, publish it to here now." Sometimes she does not even ask and it publishes anyway, because her config says that is where results go. Dozens of pages a day. 00:49:17
Give scope a numberAgents read intent well and scope badly: ask for a one-pager, get a novel. "This needs to be 500 tokens or less. You need to give something concrete, otherwise it will go on and on." 00:39:55
"I asked very briefly in the chat and it invented this way to do it."
A one-line phone request on public transport, and Fnord built the whole Watch Later skill itself. It even wrote her in the third person, "I would never refer to myself in the third person," and she kept it anyway. 00:54:52
WHAT SHE LET LOOSE
the skills and the harness from her segment. install them, then make them yours: they're living documents
impeccable
Hands a coding agent a full frontend design language so it builds production-grade interfaces instead of generic ones. The design skill she leans on: "I know absolutely nothing about design."
anki-connect
Drives Anki through the AnkiConnect API, gating every note- or card-modifying operation behind explicit confirmation. Runs as a background cron over her flashcard collection.
youtube-watch-later
Reads your Watch Later queue from a logged-in browser, summarizes each video from its transcript, and caches what it has already processed so it never repeats work.
personal-agent-harness
The Fnord setup itself: a personal agent on spare hardware, reachable over Discord or WhatsApp, with autonomy granted gradually and a skill set the agent extends for itself.
DELIBERATELY TOOL AGNOSTIC
she switches tools on purpose so her config never depends on one vendor